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  • Adventures in Coma Land
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  • A character is unconscious and near-death, and has an abnormally realistic dream. The world may be completely different from our own, but the kicker is that what you do in the dreamworld is critical to whether you wake up in the real world. This can be a result of magic, divine intervention, or purely symbolic of their struggle to remain alive, but it will rarely be addressed since it's more fun to leave it up to the audience as to whether it was real or not. Having this be the premise of a story or sequence allows writers to have the benefits of a Dream Sequence or All Just a Dream story (it doesn't have to impact any other characters or the world in general, it can be much weirder than usual, and it can explore the character's mind in a more visible way) while avoiding the problem of the
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abstract
  • A character is unconscious and near-death, and has an abnormally realistic dream. The world may be completely different from our own, but the kicker is that what you do in the dreamworld is critical to whether you wake up in the real world. This can be a result of magic, divine intervention, or purely symbolic of their struggle to remain alive, but it will rarely be addressed since it's more fun to leave it up to the audience as to whether it was real or not. Having this be the premise of a story or sequence allows writers to have the benefits of a Dream Sequence or All Just a Dream story (it doesn't have to impact any other characters or the world in general, it can be much weirder than usual, and it can explore the character's mind in a more visible way) while avoiding the problem of the sequence seeming to not matter since it didn't really happen- if the character has to make an effort in the dream world to wake up, then the effort really does make a difference. Compare Journey to the Center of the Mind, Vision Quest, Talking in Your Dreams. Adventure may possibly happen naked. See also Lotus Eater Machine, Schrodinger's Butterfly. For the fictional video game version, see Win to Exit. See also All Just a Dream and (for the unwinnable version) Dying Dream. Examples of Adventures in Coma Land include: